On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

• Author: Adam Kirsch
• Genre: Politics (Nonfiction)
• Publication Date: August 20, 2024
• Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

A prominent public intellectual tackles one of the most crucial political ideas of our moment.

Since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October 7, the term “settler colonialism” has become a center of political debate in the United States. Many progressives, academics, and student organizations justified the attack on the grounds that Israel is a settler colonial state, meaning that it was created on land taken from an indigenous people, and so can never be legitimate. The phrase was new to most Americans, and leading publications like the New York Times and the Atlantic have published articles explaining what it means. But the concept has been influential in academic and activist circles for years, shaping the way many young people think—not just about Israel and Palestine, but about the history of the United States and a host of political issues.

Building on Adam Kirsch’s October 2023 Wall Street Journal article on the topic, this short book is the first to examine the idea critically for a general readership. By exploring the most important writers, texts, and ideas in the field of settler colonial studies, Kirsch shows that it is really a new political ideology, aimed at delegitimizing not only Israel but also the United States, Canada, and Australia. He examines the sources of its appeal, which are spiritual as much as political, and how it turns indignation at past injustices into a source of new injustices today. As a compact and accessible introduction to one of the crucial political ideas of our moment, the book will speak to readers interested in the Middle East, American history, and today’s most urgent cultural-political debates.

I make no secret of my Judaism, I am a loud and proud Jew. My father was a Holocaust survivor, and after the war, was placed in a Displaced Person’s (DP) camp as a safe place, since Polish neighbors had claimed their house and all their belongings once the Jews were forcibly removed and confined in ghettos. The DP camps dotted across Europe were simply repurposed extermination camps. My father, as an early teen, had spent the majority of the war in hiding, and wasn’t exposed to all the horrors of the Holocaust, until he was placed in a DP camp in Austria. It was in the picturesque region of Upper Austria, surrounded by dramatic mountains and lakes. It was also the place where my family was to start to reckon with the destruction wrought on the Jewish people. At 14 years old, he was confined to a place where they were receiving food from American troops, but also to a place where cans of Zyklon B littered the ground, and the ground would regularly shake due to the settling of bodies in mass graves. From there, my family went to the only country that would accept them—the newly founded state of Israel. 

As the place where my father first experienced feelings of safety and protection sufficient enough to allow him to experience joys, Israel always held a special place in my father’s heart, and I was finally able to travel there with him before he passed away. He learned skilled trades, and wasn’t under threats that the Jewish people have dealt with since our forced exile from our ancestral homeland. Despite just barely escaping a genocidal war, he eagerly enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces back when there were less than 16,000 soldiers, total. My own and many other Jewish families found peace, acceptance, and joy in the only Jewish state in the entire world. And after nearly 2,000 years of diaspora, yearning to return, it became a reality, offering safe haven to Jews around the world, especially those in danger. It is only due to a random event that I wound up being born in America and not Israel. My father was a fan of facts and history, and always taught us aspects of history that were often overlooked, but also to question things, speak up at injustice, and never, ever to be ashamed of our heritage.

While this might be strange to hear as an opening for a review, I promise, it is important and incredibly relevant. Learning history from firsthand and reliable sources has always been a given in our house, and I met so many people from different backgrounds, but also Holocaust survivors who were willing to share their stories with us. History, archaeology, and military information abounds in our world. At the tap of the button, I can get the answer to basically any question I can think of within a few minutes of searching on Google. But I was taught how to research, how to identify factual and reliable sources, how to develop critical thinking skills, and find answers without turning to the Internet, which we didn’t even have back then. So I have done plenty of factual, historical readings, and learned that not only do Jewish prayers have a yearning for Zion (Jerusalem), there is reliable, peer reviewed research validating the Jewish connection to Israel—historical events, unearthed buildings, archeological treasures, and even DNA studies which show that different diaspora Jewish populations share more genetic material with each other, than with the groups they lived among for centuries, and our genes are significantly different than the people from the areas Jews spend diaspora in. For example — my family spent hundreds of years (as far as I can trace back) living in Eastern Europe. But when I examine my DNA, it comes up with less than 1% of European DNA, and my Ashkenazi Jewish DNA is almost all of the rest. Additionally, there have been Jews present in the area that is known as modern Israel since before the Common Era. Communities who can trace their lineage back to the Second Temple Period (for reference, the second temple was destroyed in 70 CE) remained in the land until the present day. 

Now, this may all seem like unnecessary background, but all of this is relevant in Kirsch’s book. Moving from the middle of last century to more recent years, settler colonialism has become one of those buzzwords, and like so many others that  ‘progressives’ rely on to make their arguments, the definition has been altered to apply to whatever they see as the biggest evil currently. Ironically, this is also how antisemitism functions: it takes a teeny tiny minority (with less than 16 million people around the world, making up 0.2% of the world population) and attributes the worst social ills of the time to Jewish people. In Nazi Germany, it was because Jewish people were labeled impure, a threat to Aryans, and communists. In communist countries, Jews were labeled as capitalists. Yet in today’s world? Jews are labeled as white colonizers, settlers, child killers, genocide apologists, secret controllers of the world, and in at least one bizarre case, capable of causing forest fires because of a ‘Jewish space laser.’ But perhaps the most persistent misinformation of our time is that Israelis (and diaspora Jews) are ‘white settler colonialists perpetrating a genocide on the indigenous Palestinian Arabs.’ But as I was brought up to question everything by a man who barely survived a genocide as a child, because he knew the risks of just listening to what you’re told to do, regardless of whether it was right or wrong, aligned with or pitted against their morals. 

Antisemitism has been called the world’s oldest hate, and it has stayed present in varying levels (but never quite disappearing) throughout history by labeling Jews as what the society feels most negatively about. In the Medieval period, it was for spreading disease, stealing Christian children to use their blood in making Passover matzah, and rejecting Christ; during communism in the USSR, Jews were labeled as intellectuals and plotting against the country; and currently, Jews are referred to as white colonizers, genocidal baby killers, and modern day Nazis. Just like in the past, when it was okay to kill Jews for having ‘impure blood’ that placed the German people at risk from Jewish control, present day has simply substituted ‘Zionists’ for ‘Jews,’ labels their antisemitism as ‘just anti-Zionism,’ and frames them as displacing the indigenous Palestinian Arabs. 

Settler colonialism is a buzzy word that we see tossed around often, but what does it actually mean? Oxford defines it as “a type of colonialism in which the indigenous peoples of a colonized region are displaced by settlers who permanently form a society there.” Here’s another definition, this one for colonialism, same source: “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.” So in order to practice colonization, there first has to be a metropole around which the resources from the colony is sent back to. 

The book starts by exploring these two concepts, and offering the most widely known versions of settler colonialism: the colonies of America set up by the British Empire, and other British colonies, Australia and Canada. Yet, when does the statute run out? Once America declared independence from England, it was no longer a colony. Yet in many ways, Canada, America, and Australia have all had long histories of displacing and oppressing indigenous populations, and Kirsch discusses how residential schools played a role in this. 

Kirsch also dips a toe into the Israel-Hamas conflict, and how it has affected Jewish people worldwide. This quote is especially meaningful:

“Young people today, who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to prosecute and kill Jews — because they have been taught that is an expression of virtue.” — Adam Kirsch

I found myself agreeing to a lot of the statements, and I found myself wondering, how does a historically indigenous people who have maintained a continuous presence in their ancestral homeland since the first wave of settler colonialists manage to get labeled and widely accepted as a colonial project of Britain or America, depending on who you ask. The evidence of Jewish life and culture was everywhere in Israel—every step was like walking on history. In the colonies of America, Canada, or Australia, archaeological evidence isn’t found of the ancient presence of the colonizing power. Yet how can the archaeological record support Jewish presence in the land of Judea for more than two thousand years, through successive waves of Romans, Islamic Caliphates, Crusaders, Byzantines, and British imposing control over the land. 

However, the idea that is often repeated throughout the book is that ‘colonization is an idea, not an event,’ while breaking down the logical and historical fallacies inherent in the idea that Israel is a colonial project, and exploring the process of decolonization. 

“To make Israel fit its ideologically allotted role, theorists of settler colonialism must similarly redefine two central concepts: indigeneity and genocide.”

By altering the meaning of the two basic tenets underpinning colonial studies, it allows today’s social justice warriors to think that their celebration of Israeli death and torture was righteous and the Hamas attack was provoked by the fact that every single Israeli is viewed as a settler and thereby a threat, no matter how deep Jewish roots run. Our media isn’t always unbiased, and no one is infallible, so having more reliable information is helpful in understanding any situation. Yet fighting an ideology isn’t as easy as fighting an enemy you can grasp. How exactly does one fight an idea? This book doesn’t exactly have any direct examples, but the only successful example of an indigenous population decolonizing their homeland is … Israel. I apologize for such a long and rambling review, but this book resonated deeply with me and evoked a lot of complex emotions, especially in light of current events in the SWANA region. Thank you for letting me get a lot of my frustration off my chest with this review, and I highly recommend this as a read.

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